Monday, June 07, 2010

Don't sing for me, Asadullah Alshishani

A nutbar somewhere in Indiana has written some vile and incompetent anti-Semitic verse influenced by the Nazi stormtrooper song "War einst ein junger Sturmsoldat," and set it to equally incompetent music. Apparently it's intended to be a kind of salute to the people on the ill-fated flotilla into Gaza.

(With friends like this, who needs enemies? Are you listening, Helen?)

By a bizarre and lengthy chain of free association, the Usual Suspects over at Jay "Pancake Day" Currie's place are using this to smear interim co-bloggers Balbulican and Alison, and me, for being appalled by the killing of nine flotilla members at the hands of the Israel Defence Forces. That's really rather desperate at this stage. Their lip-smacking enjoyment of the killings, and their drooling wish for many more, had its inevitable reaction over here and elsewhere, and they're now lashing out defensively.

Is it too much to ask for a little consistency, at least? These erstwhile Speech Warriors™, who have eagerly defended the right of Nazis to free speech in the past--helping to open up avenues, in fact, for the latter to spew their hateful propaganda--now appear to believe that the penalty for chanting displeasing slogans and having an anti-Semite praise you should be death. Only some speech is free, it seems: other speech is deserving of capital punishment.

If someone helps me to my feet after a fall, I don't ask about his politics. The act itself is what we should judge. In this case, volunteers decided to run a blockade, illegalunderinternationallaw, to bring humanitarian relief to the people of Gaza, not weapons for Hamas. No doubt there were both saints and sinners amongst them, but they were set upon with equal ferocity by the IDF, whose subsequent efforts to excuse themselves have been grossly unconvincing--except to themselves, their government, the Israel-can-do-no-wrong crowd, and Muslim-hating gulls on both sides of the ocean.

What we're seeing here, I think, is a kind of embarrassment. The "Long Live Death" brigade, looking up from their pleased chuckling, have noticed that ordinary folks are looking at them with disgust and shying away. But this latest ploy to divert attention from their appalling indecency is not likely to improve their standing in our virtual community.

[Now, back to work. I'm pleased to report that, despite international interruptions, my thesis-writing is somehow progressing on schedule.]

10 comments:

Because the response to the flotilla incident once again included a more than significant element, quite visible in street demonstrations, to free "Palestine." Not bring aid to Gaza, not "free Gaza", but "free Palestine." Because the narrative that the flotilla included merely peace activists dedicated to bringing aid seems more than questionable, with the goal appearing to be more about breaking the blockade and with some of the "activists" not being of that activists at all, in my opinion.

I take your point. But it is instructive, nonetheless, that grotesque comments about Palestinians never seem to attract the same opprobrium as similar comments about Jews. This isn't an "apology" for the frightful Helen Thomas, just an observation worth making.

Your analogy is far from apt. Some of us don't waste time and breath criticizing North Korea, for example, not because we are soft on that regime, but because there's no one we're really talking to--no apologists here, certainly no North Korean officials. Everybody's on-side, right, left and indifferent, more or less. But one might well ask why it is that people right here at home can say appalling things about Palestinians, as Dick Armey did, without a whisper of shock by the media, no public condemnation, no sanctions, while similar remarks about Jewish Israelis attract outraged headlines and rituals of public shaming.

That's a pure double standard. Some groups are simply more equal than others. Some bigotry is less reprehensible than others. And it's in no way excusing Thomas' remarks to point that out. I want headlines for all such people. Don't you?